The entire energy system is in danger due to the accumulated losses of electricity distributors, which can no longer make investments, and that will lead to damages and multiple power outages for consumers, said Monica Hodor, CEO of E-Distribuţie, the grid company of Enel Romania.

The energy crisis is severely affecting distribution companies, which have to buy the energy needed for their own technological consumption at huge market prices. E-Distribuţie has a loss of over 300 million euros, as these costs were not recognized in the distribution tariffs, as required by law.

All the companies in this sector have gone to the banks to ask for loans to cover their losses, but here they run into another problem: the banks do not meet all the demand, they have reached the limit of exposure in the energy market and can no longer offer loans. It would take more than a billion euros to cover the entire financing needs of Romanian energy companies, says Hodor, in an interview with Agerpres.

The solutions would be to create a special platform where producers can sell electricity at a price set by the Government for the own technological consumption of distributors or partial compensation from the state budget.

“First of all, let me define this technological consumption. When the transfer is made from the generator to the transformer, the energy is changed, the transfer is made from high voltage to medium voltage and then in our homes at low voltage. These are technological losses, the consumption that exists in any production process, not only in the energy sector, and these losses are recognized in the tariff.

In Romania, compared to other European countries, the distributor is obliged to buy these losses on the wholesale market, because this is the methodology.

This methodology states that both the price and the quantities are recognized ex-ante by the regulator. At that moment, as a result of the energy crisis, prices exploded, the price recognized (by ANRE) is half of what we had to pay, and because of this, the distributor began to have financial difficulties. Because the distributor, from the distribution tariff we talked about earlier, can only cover this technological consumption, no longer having room for investments or maintenance operations, which will lead to a problem for future investments.

We are talking about the decade of electrification, but this can only be done through investment. Network investments, investments for electric mobility, for renewables. The distributor has the central role, it is the one that unites all the flows. If there are no more investments, how do we go further in the decade of electrification, how do we put the customer at the center and focus on the customer’s needs?,” said Monica Hodor.